Fighting Back

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Inside Re-Mission, a new game that gives teen-patients the power to blast cancer away. Oh, and it's fun, too.

By Jonathan Miller

The doctor said it was asthma, Saif Azar remembers. As an 11-year-old boy in his native country of Jordan, he didn't know that his coughing and lack of appetite were early symptoms of Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of leukemia that aggressively attacks the lymph system. At the time, Azar didn't even know what cancer was; he only knew it was a bad word that took the life of his aunt.

Three year later, after moving to the United States for a number of surgeries and chemotherapy sessions, Azar sounds like an expert. Part of this comes from being a naturally curious 14-year-old boy, hoping to be a doctor one day. But some part of this comes from the new videogame called Re-Mission, developed specifically for teens fighting cancer. But this isn't your ordinary educational game, the boring kind kids toss aside before sneaking in a few sessions of Halo. Developed by a team with a history in commercial videogames, Re-Mission is actually fun. Also, teens that have played Re-Mission are more likely to adhere to their often painful chemotherapy treatment schedules; they are more knowledgeable about their own illnesses; and most importantly, kids are generally happier and more comfortable living with cancer.

In the game, Azar controls Roxxi, a sassy, female nanobot that navigates the blood stream and eliminates different kinds of cancer, from Hodgkin's disease to bone cancer to the final boss, brain cancer. Hodgkin's cancer cells look like purple and pink eyelashes that flood the screen. To defeat the multiplying cells, Roxxi continually shoots chemotherapy at the clusters until every last one is destroyed.

The brain is a hotbed of electrical activity.

"If you leave it for one or two seconds, it will keep reproducing more and more of these little cancer cells," Azar said. "That's what causes Hodgkin's lymphoma."

Infused with a bit of crude humor from Roxxi, cancer education and third-person shooting, Re-Mission is empowering teens, giving them a chance to fight back against their illnesses. It may only be a game, but there is something cathartic about having the ability to see and shoot the same cancer cells that are currently ravaging your own body. Otherwise, cancer is an invisible, intangible enemy, and the most common cure is chemotherapy that usually makes you feel worse off than before.

"One thing it does is give kids a tool to fight the disease, a sense of power and control," said Pat Christen, the president of HopeLab, the non-profit organization that created Re-Mission. "We know from lots of data that if you perceive that you're up to the challenge of fighting cancer, then your prognosis is going to be much better."

When Christen says "lots of data," she means it. HopeLab conducted a randomized, controlled trial to test the benefits of Re-Mission specifically on teens with cancer. The study tested 375 male and female patients with different kinds of cancer at 34 different medical centers in the United States, Canada and Australia. The rigor of the study was on par with a commercial drug study -- HopeLab needed to make sure Re-Mission was not only fun but beneficial to patients. Otherwise the project would be considered a failure.